'Digging' Unearths Organic Energy

Author: Michael Hatch

The title "Digging" is the only word appropriate to describe the joint showing of artworks by Joseph Schine '03 and Sally Olson '03, which opened last Friday in the Johnson Gallery.
The furious energy of Schine's drawings, videos and dirt sculpture matched Olson's layered and design-oriented works, creating a dynamic that was both organic and welcoming.
For Schine's work, the metaphor of digging is even literal. In "Unearthed," a dirt-drawing of a massive skeleton designed on gesso, forms are actually excavated from a layer of dirt with tools as small as a toothbrush.
Like an archaeological excavation on Johnson's second floor, Schine's giant skeleton sits above the floor surface, but by clever manipulation of perspective the skeleton descends deep into the perceived space of the floor.
The dirt becomes believable, as if the linoleum has been removed, and while digging, the artist has found the remains of some long-dead Titan.
In "Unearthed," Schine's technical control is most visible. From the recession of scale to the finely detailed and modeled bone-structure, including smaller plates of an embryo and a human-sized pelvic bone which lay over top the skeleton, the draftsmanship is beautiful.
This concentration on draftsmanship carries over into Shine's untitled series of wall drawings in marker, acrylic, pen and charcoal, as well as added sculptural elements surrounding three sides of the skeleton on the second floor.
Schine drew the series like graffiti directly onto the framed white pushboard walls that surround the atrium. The composition has no center or focus, and instead acts as a glimpse into Schine's process of creation.
A loosely posted grid of photocopies from a handful of drawings, which culminates in a large-scale drawing, hang on the south wall. These drawings make the conglomeration of the photocopied ideas. Each single drawing is done directly onto the wall and spills over the framed space onto the backing wall.
As the 30-odd photocopies abut each other, sometimes repeating the same image several times in a row, they act like the flickering of impulses - like visions of what the final image will be as it emerges into form as the wall drawing.
In a series of slips that accompany his figural drawings in the Johnson Gallery, Schine describes his process in terms of its speed, spontaneity and use of little time and a lot of space.
While this free-flowing process, based on impulse and instinct, could easily disintegrate into nothingness, Schine brings a sense of cohesion to his forms in the end, and in his series of drawings the accompanying video and sculpture work, he creates a sense of energy that feeds the viewer.
Olson's prints and paintings are similar to Schine's work in their energy, but the quality of that energy is more subdued.
In contrast to Schine's aggressive drawing style, Olson's works have a welcoming nature - a warm but delicate, familiar feeling, which she describes as focusing on "layers, pattern, design and repetition."
In "Paris Tree Grate," Olson manipulates ripped fragments of a photographed grate, gluing the forms into a vertical band and then sewing over the seams with blue thread, framing the photo elements with a similarly stitched brown border.
Several layers work to create the piece's dynamism. First are the two layers within the original photograph. The image of the grate and the small plants that emerge from its openings give a sense of dimension within the flattening photographic medium.
Then, as the pieces were ripped and re-glued, a degree of warping occurred, giving the flattened image a sense of volume.
Finally comes the sewing layer, done on top of the now-voluminous photograph to add one last and subtle layer that draws attention both to the construction of the image and to its nature as material, something to be manipulated and reconstructed.
In "Neon," an oil painting on canvas, Olson again draws attention to the layers within her work, especially between flat surface and implied volume. In this piece she works with two distinct layers.
The first is a dry landscape with a low horizon line that makes a large human-made structure in the right foreground seem imposing and monumental.
The scene feels both deserted and desert-like. The squat horizon is the simple brown tone of exposed earth or wet sand, and the thinly applied pthaylo blue sky carries no relief, no cooling tones. Laid over the entirety of this dry atmosphere is a cotton-candy-pink pattern of a tropical bird with flowers, drawn from some scrap of wallpaper.
This odd shade of pink provides cool contrast and release from the scorched landscape. Ironically, both elements, the landscape and the design, are drawn from the same source that feeds much of the work Olson shows - an abandoned house she had discovered in Weybridge, filled with vintage wallpaper and newspapers.
It is worth visiting Johnson this week for both the brisk, energized draftsmanship of Shine's art and Olson's methodical compositions, which vibrate with energy and, as they claim, are sure to "dig" up a response.